Comment by tech_ken 2 months ago
Mine is: "Why negotiate alone? Your employer has an army of lawyers and HR types to prepare your contract. If you and a bunch of coworkers pool your resources you can benefit mightily by hiring someone to sit on the other side of that table."
Incorrect, as you have no leverage as an individual employee. The less resources you pool together, the less negotiation power you have.
What you're describing is an idealized free labor market. In actuality, you are not in fair competition with other laborers because the labor market isn't a free market.
You may have less leverage as an individual.
I’ve done quite a bit of negotiation in my career and ended up with many perks and pay bumps that weren’t schedule or written down.
What I’m describing is my actual real life experience.
Unfortunately, your "real life" experience is worthless because it's at odds with reality.
Everyone likes to believe they're mama's special little laborer. One in a million, a diamond in the rough.
Even if this were true (it's not), IF you banded with fellow super duper awesome laborers you would necessarily have more bargaining power. It's just logical. If losing you is X bad, then losing 3 of you is X * 3 bad. Given X is some positive number, which is bigger: X or 3X? 3X, of course, so you have much more leverage.
What you need to keep in mind is you have absolutely 0 point of reference. You can't say "well I have a ton of leverage!" when you've never been in a SWE union. You haven't, have you? Okay, so what are you comparing against? Nothing, right?
And even though you have nothing to compare against, you still believe you're correct? With no basis? I'd check your hubris.
I see no misallocated resources. I enjoy exploiting the system that enables the yacht-havers, because then I too can have a yacht.
And while I get the feeling that most HN commenters feel some sort of misplaced injustice due to this, but the thrill of the game is part of the fun to me. I’d rather that than factory work where I can guarantee my skills will never position me to rise above my station.
The tech industry is so unique in this and it blows my mind how people just want to throw it all away.
So why not bring your better negotiation abilities to your peers? Collectively the bargaining power is way larger, and as such the upside as well.
It's an interesting follow-up, though I will say that addressing this or pretty much any other counterpoint pushes me over the three sentence limit that was requested :)
To your point directly: successful contract negotiation almost exclusively depends on what leverage you have relative to the counterparty; your skill as a negotiator matters very little if your employer isn't incentivized to come to the table (ex. imagine even an extraordinarily persuasive Amazon SWE trying to get themselves exempted from the RTO mandate in the OP). IDK what your employment situation is, but in my experience isolated employees typically have very little leverage, and therefore very little basis to successfully negotiate a better contract, a more favorable RTO policy, etc. Regardless of whether the upside risk is guaranteed or not (and I disagree that it is guaranteed), its magnitude is likely quite small if you are negotiating alone (maybe during the hiring phase you can pick up an extra 10K salary or get classified as remote, but good luck repeating that success year-over-year). The idea of bargaining as a large group (ie. as a union), rather than individually, is that you have far more leverage together than apart, and that's the most relevant factor when dealing with a big corporation like a FAANG. It's less a question of upside vs downside risk and more a question of opportunity cost: what can you get for yourself alone, vs. what can you get for everybody if you all stand together. Looking at the data, standing together is generally the more profitable approach: https://www.axios.com/2024/03/20/union-workers-wealth-compar...
I'd say because it's to your advantage to be better than your peers at negotiation. There's nothing but upside for you.